The Well

by Randal Eldon Greene

The well runs deep. This one, placed here in the center of your hundred acre wood. This well is your inheritance I hear, but it's also a structure of failed stewardship for you. I'd dump that water back in. Not even I, a well troll, will drink that. You see, the well water branches out from the earth’s fleshy hole, coursing here as a swift underground stream, there over things ossified, calcified, and squeezing through the smallest cracks of stone to rise up in a subterranean cave as a pool of cool black water that nips at the edges of ancient treasures lost to time.

I am telling you this, but are you interested? Don't believe me. Take a sip! I dare you. Ah, that got your attention. Listen, the branches of water converge inward so that all is shared, like one big veiny body, a plethora of waterslides splashing their respective ways toward the big plunge, the waterfall of waterfalls, violent, crushing, steeped in myth, invisible to all, for even the fish at those lightless depths lack eyes. But listen up; there is poison in the water. So it doesn't matter if you get it here or at a brook tricking at the western edge of your hundred acres. Nor does it matter which cup you drink from—the cup of life, the cup of grace, even the cup of youth—it's all the imbibing of the same toxins dumped by those developers you decided to let build up on the bluff. All of your hundred acres are useless. The trees' leaves are beginning to curl up like sleeping black bats. The wildlife is dropping dead or wandering off.

Yeah, I'm sorry too. Sorry your land and my well got messed up this way. Sorry that the desecration of one bit of pond water at the base of a bluff is the devastation of the whole wood. Sorry that this pail of well water we’ve been contemplating will have to be dumped back in like waste. Like stinking trash. Oh well. Oh well.

Randal Eldon Greene is the author of Descriptions of Heaven (Harvard Square Editions), a poetic allegory of climate change revolving around a linguist and the monster spotted in the waters of the professor’s lakeside home. Greene’s collection Blabber, Chat, Shouting Match: 50 Dialogue-Only Fictions (corona\samizdat) takes the traditional genre of literary dialogue and interrogates the form through a fictional lens in our era of hyper-communication and viral misinformation. Find Greene on Instagram @randaleldongreene. Links to all of his publications, interviews, and live podcast readings can be found on AuthorGreene.com